


To Tear Down What She Built Up

by insecureAuthor



Series: A Changing Alternia [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4520391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insecureAuthor/pseuds/insecureAuthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Heiress seeks an old revolutionary. She finds him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theresnoreason](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theresnoreason/gifts).



The first time you see the Heiress, you think you’re about to die. She takes off her hood and looks just like her ancestor in miniature, sharp teeth under a bright smile. But she makes the sign of the heretics, your sign, with her hands, and bows her head so you allow yourself to hope.

However, you don’t let hope make you stupid.

Your scarred hand rests on your sickle and you eye her warily. Her smile doesn’t waver, but her fins twitch down. She’s nervous. Good. It means she considers you a threat.

For all that she’s the spitting image of her ancestor, they sound nothing alike. Her voice, when she speaks, is like water flowing down a shale cliff.

“Sufferer! I’ve been looking for you!” She seems overjoyed, and you try not to let her see you wince. Where did kids get the idea that you wanted to be named for the time you were tortured nearly to death?

“Ah… I prefer to be called Signless. Many people are looking for me, child. The important question, of course, is why.” You still have the voice of an orator, even after all these sweeps, and it commands her attention. She stares up at you, eyes wide. You wonder if she truly expected you to be here, or if she was just chasing tales.

“Of course, Signless, I shoalda figured.” Her smile would be disarming, if it weren’t on a seadweller’s face, full of shark’s teeth. “I, well. I came to see if you would help me!” She puts her arms out, palms up, in an archaic gesture of peace. You’re not convinced.

“I’m afraid I don’t see what I could offer you, Heiress.”

She tugs up one side of her traveling cloak, revealing a truly ugly wound. There was a cursory attempt made at bandaging it, but you can see the edges of it peeking out, the gauze falling away, and her royal blood soaking through the dressing.

“I was hoping you could help with this, first off. I fell on a sharp rock a few nights ago and—“

“A few nights ago?!” You interrupt her with a screech. “You need stitches, and antibiotics, and you just slapped some cloth on there and hoped for the best? Sit down!” You gesture at the stool you vacated when she entered your cave. She doesn’t so much sit down as collapse, but she ends up on the chair, which is good enough for you. Quickly, you grab your medical kit, taking out soothebloom and a battered old tube of antibiotic cream. You cut away the bandages with kitchen shears and gasp at the damage. You can see bone. Fuck but this kid doesn’t take care of herself. She giggles, and you realize you said the last part out loud.

“I wanted to get here as fast as possibubble! I didn’t have tide to stop and check up on every boo-boo.”

You start to clean the wound with a damp rag, scowling. “It was still remarkably foolish. I’m surprised you’ve lived this long, between your reckless disregard for injuries and your apparent willingness to let a strange troll treat you. You don’t even fucking know me, I could be poisoning you right now!” You’d considered it, even. Perhaps that would have been smarter. It’s certainly dumb as fuck to let a highblood, a seadweller, a gods-damned _Heiress_ leave and spread around the fact that you’re still alive.

“’How one treats another who has been made helpless reflects how good one truly is,’” she says in a singsong tone. You stop cleaning her upper arm for a moment, and need to force yourself to continue. Is she mocking you?

 “I know you weren’t at any of my sermons, kid. Before your time. Where did you hear that?”

She winces as you apply the antibiotic and begin the stitching. “Ow. I read it in a book my old moirail gave me. He stole it from a lowblood he went flarping with. She was an archeologist, and found some of your writing on the walls of caves or ruins, and detided to get it all together in one book. He wanted to burn it, but I insisted that history should be kelp’t safe.” She shrugs with her uninjured shoulder. “I’m glad I did. You had some pretty neat ideas!”

You’re wary now. The last people who thought that made some kind of weird cult around your dying declarations of hatred. She doesn’t look like the cultish type, though.

“I assume you didn’t, in fact, injure yourself and then decide to hunt me down to play nurse. Was there something else you needed?”

 Her eyes meet yours, and you’re surprised at the fire there.

“I want you to help me. I don’t want to just take down the Condesce and become just like her, uphold her Empire. I want to tear hers down and make a new one. Mine. Ours. Everyone’s. I need you to help me make an Empire that’s good for everyone, or at least not so coddamn shitty.”

She’s fucking crazy. You think you’re in love.

“Deal.”

This is a terrible idea, and when the Empress catches you this time, she’ll make sure you’re really dead, and don’t just end up with a few burns on your wrists. But you think it’ll be worth it. You’re no stranger to throwing yourself into the fire for the sake of a noble cause.

You have to ask. “What’s your name anyway, kid?” Might as well know who you’re dragging down with you.

She smiles. “Feferi. I’m glad we could work somefin out.”

“You need to sleep, Feferi. We’ll talk in the evening.” She makes a few token protests, but the soothebloom is already kicking in, and you can see her eyelids drooping. You pull out some extra blankets and set her up a cot. You’re half expecting her to complain, since these aren’t exactly typical highblood accommodations, but she sinks into it gratefully. She’s asleep before you know it.

You make yourself a cup of tea and watch her sleep, imagining the future that you two can build.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo! Okay, I don't feel like I really did this prompt justice. I may write a continuation, and once I get my tablet fixed I plan on illustrating it. I hope you like it!


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes up a few short hours later, and your head aches. This girl will _not_ stop talking. Certainly, it’s talk about things you’re interested in! The improvement of the trollish race is an important subject, and 12 sweep old you would be all over this. But this kid, Feferi, she’s just so naïve.

She may be fully matured at nine sweeps, but you can’t stop thinking of her as a child.

She has so many ideas.

Some of them you recognize from your sermons, but many are her own invention, and most of both seem ridiculous to you now.

She wants to abolish the hemospectrum the second her predecessor’s body hits the floor, and, while that’s a nice thought, it really won’t go over well. She also wants highbloods to start taking care of “flawed” lowbloods instead of killing them, and redefine “culling” to mean caring for someone.

The thing is, you’ve met highbloods willing to do this before. Almost none of them were pleasant, once you scraped the surface. You remember a woman, tall, lean, and strong, with straight horns and purple blood, who was supposed to be trollmom’s friend. You’d stayed with her for weeks, as she kept coming up with reasons for your little group to stay, until finally she came clean.

“You people… you just aren’t safe on the open road. Nutrix, honey, I know you’re jade, but this thing isn’t so little anymore, and you weren’t meant to care for children, only grubs. Leave him here. I’ll protect him.”

She’d gazed at you with hungry eyes, and when your mother woke you up in the middle of day to go, you didn’t protest. She hadn’t even spoken to you during your stay. She didn’t know you, but apparently she thought she knew enough to determine you couldn’t take care of yourself.

Her lusus had evidently been ordered to stop you from leaving. The scalemawbeast was no match for your mother’s hatchets. You left it dying on the sand, blood drying quickly in the daylight, and you buried your face in trollmom’s cloak and cried.

You imagine that being encouraged, other children being coddled and kept like little pets if they were defective, and you shudder.

The idea has no appeal to you, and she won’t understand why. She tosses her hair behind her, where it gathers in a soft cloud.

“It’s the respawnsibility of the strong to protect the weak. I don’t know why yoar objecting to this! I’ve been planning it my _whole life_.”

Of course she has. You sigh.

“Yes, except not all of the people you say you’d… cull… are weak. It isn’t just people who need help asking for some, it’s you trying to get a highblood to come in and meddle with their lives.”

She rolls her eyes, and you want to choke her, just a little.

“Yeah, silly! Because if I waited for them to _ask_ for kelp, we wouldn’t be helping nearly as many people as my way! We’ll just fiddle with the drone’s programming, and have them take people who would have been culled under the old Empress to me, and I’ll find someone to cull them.”

“…So. What you’re saying is, you’ll take Alternian kids, kids who have reason to believe drones, or anyone with the wrong mindset, will kill them. And you’ll send a drone to their hive. And that drone will take them away from everything they’ve ever known. What about their lususes? What about their things?”

She beams, clearly thrilled with her own brilliant plans. “Well, the cullers will be like a lusus and a temporary moirail and an authority figure all in one, so they won’t need their lusus anymore!”

You stare blankly at her. Her smile doesn’t waver.

“…Okay. Let’s. Set that aside, for a moment. What about their things?”

“The culler can buy them new things, anything they want! I’ll open up the treasury and give each culler a stipend they can spend on their charge.”

Of course. ‘Just buy a new one!’ Never mind anything with sentimental value, or the fact that these cullers may not let their charges get what they really want. Just throw money at a problem, and it’ll disappear! Highbloods. Run a hand through your hair.

Psii never would have been one, he was too powerful, but he told you of slaves sold, essentially, as pets. You picture these children sitting on velvet cushions, sitting around, looking decorative, but then they age. They can’t even be decoration anymore. They’re kicked out at ten, with no skills, no money, and no concept of the world outside their gilded cage.

A flash of Beforus comes to you, they had this “culling” too, Psii-but-not-Psii screams and tries to wrench himself out of arms that cling to him like iron bars, he screeches, he cries, he tells them what he needs. All he gets are condescending pats on the head and baby talk from the caretaker. She coos and tells him he has nothing to worry about anymore, she’s here, she’ll never leave-

You wrench yourself out of the vision and shudder.

“No culling your way.”

She rolls her eyes, but humors you and drops the topic. You move on to a different one before you can make up your mind to throttle her.

“A basic income. You pay everyone an amount enough to live on, and not just as kids like She does now, adults too. Even the ones without jobs.”

She brightens.

“Yeah! We give the cullers the money for their charges-“

“No, you don’t. You give the charges the money. You want to cull people for having fucking missing limbs, a kid with one leg can still handle his own money.”

“Well, we can’t assume the culled will be responsible-“

“And yet, you feel perfectly comfortable assuming the cullers, the ones with all the power, will be! Isn’t that just fine and goddamn dandy, boy, it’s a good thing able-bodied highbloods are always good and pure, oh no WAIT-“

She cuts you off before you can start yelling. She’s pouting and kicking at the floor.

“Whale. Fine. You didn’t need to be such a writhing sack of bulges about it.”

You bark out a surprised laugh.

“Sorry, kiddo, it’s my one setting.”

Your talks continue much in this way. She doesn’t have much real world experience, and she wants so desperately to believe that people are good, and you don’t want to totally take that away. It’s refreshing. She’s effervescent and bright, and manages to sway you a few times, or point out something you hadn’t thought of before.

You spend most of the time you aren’t gardening talking to her.

It’s nice to not be alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Whoo! Okay, I don't feel like I really did this prompt justice. I may write a continuation, and once I get my tablet fixed I plan on illustrating it. I hope you like it!


End file.
